America's Worst Prison Closed 51 Years Ago. Except It Didn't.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was conceived as a place to put the worst of the worst. The prisoners that kept starting problems at the other prisons. Put them all together, the thinking went. It wasn't a place for rehabilitation. It was a place to isolate the infection. Over the 29 years it operated, starting in 1934, “Hellcatraz” earned a reputation so fearsome, it has a powerful hold on the American imagination to this day.

Alcatraz was finally shuttered, 51 years ago today, not because it was brutal, though it was, or because living conditions were inhumane, though they were. It simply cost too much.

This isn’t a secret. But it’s easy to forget. Because people tend to know three things about Alcatraz: 1) It was brutal 2) No one escaped and lived to tell about it, and 3) It’s closed. Lost along the way was “very inefficient from a budgetary standpoint.”

You could be forgiven for assuming that one morning in the spring of 1963, everyone woke up and said, “hey, wait a minute, let’s treat our prisoners better!” Maybe JFK was there and the wind was blowing in his hair and he smiled, and Bobby was there too, and he looked very serious and maybe one of them quoted Dostoyevsky’s line that “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” and then they shut the prison and went sailing and Jackie was there and everyone was happy. But that didn’t happen. Everyone was fine with the prisoners being treated the way they were.